Abstract
Science as a factor in human life is a latecomer. Art existed before the last ice age and is at least fifty thousand years old. Modern science, on the other hand, was born only four hundred years ago. Galileo was the father and gravity the midwife; historiography and tradition have assigned the role of founding myth to the tale of Galileo’s experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Two more tales, Newton sitting under the apple tree and Einstein having the happiest thought of his life, articulate the history of our ideas about gravity. These pages tell those tales.
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Notes
- 1.
Voltaire. Lettres Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois, et Autres Sujets, Par M.D.V. Basle 1734.
Gravity, of which all philosophers have sought so long the cause in vain, and in which the vulgar does not even suspect any mystery.
- 2.
Mircea Eliade. Mythes, rêves et mystères, Paris, Gallimard, «Les Essais», 1957.
- 3.
Mircea Eliade, Le chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase, Paris, Payot, «Bibliothèque scientifique», 1950. 2e édition revue et augmentée, 1968; «Payothèque».
- 4.
Russell (1931).
- 5.
Viviani (1938), p. 606.
«[…] furono da esso [Galileo] convinte di falsità […] moltissime conclusioni dell'istesso Aristotele intorno alla materia del moto, […] come, tra l'altre, che le velocità de’ mobili dell'istessa materia, disegualmente gravi, movendosi per un istesso mezzo, non conservano altrimenti la proporzione delle gravità loro, […] anzi che si muovon tutti con pari velocità, dimostrando ciò con replicate esperienze, fatte dall'altezza del Campanile di Pisa con l'intervento delli altri lettori e filosofi e di tutta la scolaresca».
- 6.
Segre (1989).
- 7.
Galileo himself probably told the story to Viviani in 1641, while dictating to him the answer to a letter received from Vincenzio Renieri in which new experiments of fall from the top of the tower were presented to the Master. That reply letter is lost. It would have proven that the Leaning Tower Experiment really took place.
- 8.
“Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed this into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics, indeed of modern science altogether”. Einstein (1933).
- 9.
Rossi (2001).
- 10.
Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze - Del violento, o vero de i proietti. Giornata quarta.
- 11.
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet. Chapter I. Mr Sherlock Holmes (1891).
- 12.
Commander David R Scott (2 August 1971, lunar surface): “Well, in my left hand I have a feather; in my right hand, a hammer. And I guess one of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo, a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. And we thought: ‘Where would be a better place to confirm his findings than on the Moon?
- 13.
And also a few years later, when he presented the law of free fall in a letter to Paolo Sarpi. There was a mistake in Galileo reasoning that compensated his wrong assumption. Here an excerpt of the letter to Paolo Sarpi where the law of the falling bodies is pronounced for the first time.
GALILEO a PAOLO SARPI in Venezia. Padova, 16 ottobre 1604.
Molto Rev. do Sig. re et Pad. ne Col. mo.
Ripensando circa le cose del moto, nelle quali, per dimostrare li accidenti da me osservati, mi mancava principio totalmente indubitabile da poter porlo per assioma, mi son ridotto ad una proposizione la quale ha molto del naturale et dell'evidente; et questa supposta, dimostro poi il resto, cioè gli spazzii passati dal moto naturale esser in proporzione doppia dei tempi.
- 14.
Koyré (1939).
- 15.
Alexandre Koyré. Ibidem.
- 16.
Koyré (1943).
- 17.
The philosophy is written in this great book which is continually opened before our eyes (I say the universe) but it cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.
- 18.
Stukeley (1936).
- 19.
Like Newton’s, the apple tree of the Garden of Eden was a tree of knowledge!
- 20.
Voltaire, Ibidem.
- 21.
A. Einstein. Collected Works. Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918–1921 (English translation supple-ment) Page 136.
- 22.
Cette Pesanteur […] dans laquelle le vulgaire ne soupçonne pas même de mystère.
Someone who throws a cigarette butt on the ground, might in fact be not a rude knucklehead who dirties the city, but a peripatetic student who let go the butt to its natural place.
References
A. Einstein, On the method of theoretical physics. Philos. Sci. 1(2), 163–169 (1933)
A. Koyré, Études galiléennes (Hermann, Paris, 1939)
A. Koyré, Galileo and Plato. J. Hist. Ideas 4(4), 400–428 (1943)
P. Rossi, La nascita della scienza moderna in Europa. Laterza (2001)
B. Russell, The Scientific Outlook (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1931)
M. Segre, Galileo, Viviani and the tower of Pisa. Stud. Hist. Philos. Sci. Part A 20(4), 435–451 (1989)
W. Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, etc. White (London, 1936), pp. 19–21
V. Viviani, Racconto istorico della vita di Galileo Galilei, in Le opere di Galileo Galilei, XIX, 1938 [1654], p. 606.
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Moschella, U. (2023). Three Tales of Gravity. In: Streit-Bianchi, M., Michelini, M., Bonivento, W., Tuveri, M. (eds) New Challenges and Opportunities in Physics Education. Challenges in Physics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37387-9_4
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